Killing Floor

Because the children were asleep on the office floor. Hubble’s kids. Ben and Lucy. Sprawled out on a pile of empty burlap sacks. Fast asleep, wide open and i

The children had been worrying the hell out of me. They were what made this whole damn thing just about impossible. I’d thought it through a thousand times. I’d run war games through my head, trying to find one that would work. I hadn’t found one. I’d always come up with some kind of a bad outcome. What the staff colleges call unsatisfactory results. I’d always come up with the children splattered all over the place by the big shotguns. Children and shotguns don’t mix. And I’d always visualized the four hostages and the two shotguns in the same place at the same time. I’d visualized panicking children and Charlie screaming and the big Ithacas booming. All in the same place. I hadn’t come up with any kind of a solution. If I could have given anything I ever had or ever would have, I’d have given it to have the children fast asleep somewhere else on their own. And it had happened. It had happened. The elation roared in my ears like a hysterical crowd in a huge stadium.

I turned to the other two. Cupped a hand behind each of their heads and pulled them close to mine. Spoke in the faintest of whispers.

“Hubble, take the girl,” I whispered. “Finlay, take the boy. Put a hand over their mouths. No sound at all. Carry them back to the tree. Hubble, take them on back to the car. Stay there with them and wait. Finlay, come back here. Do it now. Do it quietly.”

I pulled out the Desert Eagle and clicked the safety off. Clamped my wrist against the door frame and aimed across the office at the i

I RELAXED. LOWERED THE GUN. LISTENED HARD. HEARD nothing but the faint noises scraping up from inside the huge metal shed. I crept into the office. Crawled over the floor to the windows. Slowly raised my head up and looked out and down. Saw a sight I would never ever forget.

There were a hundred arc lights bolted up inside the roof of the warehouse. They lit the place up brighter than day. It was a big space. Must have been a hundred feet long, maybe eighty deep. Maybe sixty feet high. And it was full of dollar bills. A gigantic dune of money filled the whole shed. It was piled maybe fifty feet high into the back far corner. It sloped down to the floor like a mountainside. It was a mountain of cash. It reared up like a gigantic green iceberg. It was huge.

I saw Teale at the far end of the shed. He was sitting on the lower slope of the mountain, maybe ten feet up. Shotgun across his knees. He was dwarfed by the huge green pile rearing above him. Fifty feet closer to me, I saw old man Kliner. Sitting higher up on the slope. Sitting on forty tons of money. Shotgun across his knees.

The two shotguns were triangulated on Roscoe and Charlie Hubble. They were tiny figures forty feet below me. They were being made to work. Roscoe had a snow shovel. One of those curved things they use in the snow states to clear their driveways. She was pushing drifts of dollars toward Charlie. Charlie was scooping them into air conditioner cartons and tamping them in firmly with a garden rake. There was a line of sealed boxes behind the two women. In front of them was the huge stockpile. They toiled away far below me, dwarfed like two ants below the mountain of dollar bills.

I held my breath. I was transfixed. It was an utterly unbelievable sight. I could see Kliner’s black pickup truck. It was backed in, just inside the roller door. Next to it was Teale’s white Cadillac. Both were big automobiles. But they were nothing next to the mountain of cash. They were just like toys on the beach. It was awesome. It was a fantastic scene from a fairy tale. Like a huge underground cavern in an emerald mine from some glittering fable. All brightly lit by the hundred arc lights. Tiny figures far below. I couldn’t believe it. Hubble had said a million dollars in singles was a hell of a sight. I was looking at forty million. It was the height of the drift that did it to me. It towered way up. Ten times higher than the two tiny figures working at floor level. Higher than a house. Higher than two houses. It was incredible. It was a huge warehouse. And it was full of a solid mass of money. Full of forty million genuine one-dollar bills.

The two women were moving with the dullness of extreme fatigue, like exhausted troopers at the end of some cruel maneuver. Asleep on their feet, moving about automatically while their minds screamed for rest. They were packing armful after armful of dollars from the gigantic stockpile into the boxes. It was a hopeless task. The Coast Guard retreat had caught Kliner by surprise. He wasn’t ready. The warehouse was hopelessly jammed. Roscoe and Charlie were being worked like exhausted slaves. Teale and Kliner were watching them like overseers, listlessly, like they knew they were at the end of the road. The enormous drift of cash was going to bury them. It was going to engulf them and choke them to death.

I heard the faint clang of Finlay’s feet on the fire escape. I crawled back out of the office and met him on the metal platform outside.

“They’re back at the car,” he whispered to me. “How we doing here?”

“Two shotguns out and ready,” I whispered. “Roscoe and Charlie look OK.”

He glanced in toward the bright light and the faint noises.

“What are they all doing in there?” he asked me in a whisper.

“Come take a look,” I said softly. “But hold your breath.”

We crawled in together. Crawled over the floor to the windows. Slowly popped our heads up. Finlay looked down at the fantastic scene below. He stared down for a long time. His eyes flicked all over the place. Ended up staring at me. Holding his breath.

“Christ,” he whispered.

I nodded him back out. We crawled to the fire escape platform.

“Christ,” he whispered again. “Can you believe that?”

I shook my head.

“No,” I whispered back to him. “I can’t believe it.”

“What are we going to do?” he asked me.

I held my hand up to make Finlay wait on the platform. Crawled back inside and peered down through the window. I looked all over the place. Looked at where Teale was sitting, looked at the office i

Old man Kliner was the nearest person to us. Roscoe and Charlie were working between him and Teale. Teale was the dangerous one because he was at the far end of the warehouse. When I came out at the top of the inside stairs, they were all four going to look up at me. Kliner was going to raise his shotgun. Teale was going to raise his shotgun. They were both going to shoot at me.

Kliner had a straight shot, sixty degrees upward, like a duck hunter. But Roscoe and Charlie were down there between Teale and me. Teale was going to be shooting on a fairly shallow angle. He was already perched ten feet up the slope. He would be looking for another thirty feet of elevation from a distance of a hundred feet. A shallow angle. Maybe fifteen or twenty degrees. His big Ithaca was designed to cover a much wider spread than fifteen or twenty degrees. His shot was going to catch the women in a murderous spray. His shot was going to kill them. When Teale looked up at me and fired, Roscoe and Charlie were going to die.